Sauri

The final piece of my trip to Kenya was a one-day visit to a place called Sauri. A small village in western Kenya, near Lake Victoria, Sauri is one of the Millenium Project Villages run by the Earth Institute at Columbia. I made the visit as a favor to some folks I knew who were interested in learning about the village, and since they knew I was on my way to Kenya, they asked if I could stop by during my trip. I only had a day, but it was amazing how many interviews one can pack into daylight hours.

Ouko and I flew out together to Kisumu early in the morning, and we met with the head of the local office in town. Then we were scheduled to head out to the field office. When we came downstairs to head to the truck, there was a woman waiting at the office, a professor emeritus from Columbia who worked on family planning. She was on her way to Uganda, but wanted to visit Sauri first. So she hopped into the truck with us for the drive out to the village. When we got to the field office (where we were going to check on some reported problems with their Internet connectivity), there was a guy from Britain who currently teaches agriculture in Uganda who also was in the area and had heard about the project, and wanted to take a look. So he jumped in the truck with us, too. By the time we got to the first meeting in the village, we also met up with two members of the Kenyan office of ActionAid. We'd turned into quite an entourage, but I got the impression that wasn't uncommon.

We met with the coordinating committe of the village, saw the health clinic, visited the primary school, talked with some teachers, saw the new kitchen and learned about the school feeding program, saw the electricity that had been run to the school and the giant transformer stranded on the front lawn waiting for the right engineer to come by and step down the power, met with the agricultural committee, talked with the infrastructure guy, visited a water project, saw the impressive corn crop that had benefited from improved seeds and fertilizer, and then met with some folks outside of the village. It was a very interesting day, and Ouko and I learned a surprising amount in a short time span.

I'm not going to write much more about it here, at least not now. But feel free to contact me if you want to know more.